(upbeat music) - Years ago, Tom and I went on a trip to Duluth.

I had heard about and always wanted to see Glensheen Mansion.

Well, we did get a chance to tour the mansion and it was fabulous.

As we were leaving, we noticed flower and vegetable gardens too, but we were on a tight schedule.

So didn't get a chance to check them out.

I'm Mary Holm, host of Prairie Yard and Garden, and let's go find out about those gardens.

We'll visit the Glensheen Estate from the ground on up.

- [Narrator] Funding for Prairie Yard and Garden is provided by Heartland Motor Company, providing service to Minnesota and the Dakotas for over 30 years in the heart of truck country.

Heartland Motor Company, we have your best interest at heart.

Farmers Mutual Telephone Company and Federated Telephone Cooperative, proud to be powering ACIRA, pioneers in bringing state-of-the-art technology to our rural communities.

Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen in honor of Shalom Hill Farm, a nonprofit rural education retreat center in a beautiful Prairie setting near Windham, Minnesota.

And by friends of Prairie Yard and Garden, a community of supporters like you, who engage in the long term growth of the series.

To become a friend of Prairie Yard and Garden, visit pioneer.org/pyg.

We have a pretty big area for our own yard.

It is probably the size of three city lots, total.

And between mowing, weeding and caring for the garden and flowers, it's fun, but it takes a lot of time.

I can't even imagine what is all involved to keep up the Glensheen Estate, but it will sure be interesting to find out.

First, we'll get some background history and information from Jane and then we'll connect with head gardener Emily Ford too.

Welcome Jane.

- Thank you so much.

- Jane, tell us about yourself and your job here at Glensheen.

- Yeah, so my name is Jane Pederson-Jandl.

I'm the marketing manager here at Glensheen.

I've been here for almost eight years and it has been a fabulous place to work.

As marketing manager, it's my honor and privilege to be able to tell the world about how cool Glensheen and the entire 12 acre estate is.

So I'm honored to be here and chatting with you today.

- When was this beautiful place built?

- Construction of Glensheen Mansion started in 1905 and was completed in 1908, completely finished with all of the landscape and everything in 1909.

- And who was it built for?

- It was built for Chester and Clara Congdon as their family home and all of their children.

The Congdons are very much important and integral to the development of Duluth and the Northland region.

Glensheen exists because of the Northland's iron range.

Chester Congdon was an attorney for the Oliver Mining Company.

And so at the time there were big names like Rockefeller and Carnegie doing their business dealings in the Northlands.

Rockefeller had his eye on the mineral rich Northland.

And so Chester Congdon decided to convince his client, the Oliver Mining Company, to align with Rockefeller's arch rival Carnegie.

And so eventually after all of that, long story short, the industry folded into what we know today as U.S. Steel.

All of the investors that were a part of this became very rich.

Chester included was an investor, hence Glensheen Mansion today.

- How big is the mansion?

- Glensheen Mansion is 39 rooms, 27,000 square feet, 15 bedrooms, 15 fireplaces.

It is quite the site.

- Does it have modern utilities in it too?

- Absolutely.

So that is a fun fact about Glensheen is that Glensheen was built with electricity and plumbing, which was very common for the early 1900s within the city of Duluth.

- So why all the fireplaces too?

- Well, as you can imagine, Duluth in the winter can get a bit chilly.

They did have radiator heat.

So they had heat, but the fireplaces were a great addition to really warm up the mansion.

So the Congdon family had 12 or so full-time staff members working for them.

They had maids, they had butlers, they had chauffeurs, mechanics, they had gardeners, you name it.

It takes quite a team to make a 12 acre estate, 39 room mansion run like it did.

Glensheen Mansion was bequeathed to the University of Minnesota in the late 1960s.

Glensheen then opened to the public as a historic host museum in 1979, and we've been open to the public for tours ever since.

One of the fun misconceptions is that Glensheen is a bed and breakfast, which is not true.

Glensheen is open to the public for tours.

We host community events and we're open year round, which is a great way for folks to experience the history and the impact that Glensheen and the Congdon family has had.

- Thank you very, very much Jane for telling us about the history of this beautiful mansion and I'd like to find out more about the gardens.

- Yeah, the 12 acre estate is absolutely beautiful and Glensheen's head gardener, Emily Ford, is the perfect person to tell you all about it.

(upbeat music) - While people tend to think of California as the wine mecca of the US, we have many delicious wines and wineries right here in Minnesota.

Many of the wineries in Minnesota provide on-farm experiences where you can learn more about wine making and taste a lot of delicious wines.

Today I'm at Carlos Creek Winery near Alexandria, touring their beautiful 200 acre farm where they make 20 internationally awarded grape and apple wines.

Carlos Creek also offers wine tasting, appetizers and friendly tours of their wine making facility.

It's a delightful way to spend an afternoon.

Minnesota is home to nine grape varieties.

Our climate and soil present unique growing conditions for grapes.

Tami Bredeson, owner of Carlos Creek Winery, thinks our Minnesota grapes provide a special wine experience.

- Minnesota grapes are special because they survive 20 degrees below zero, and they're grown on their own roots.

So even if they do die to the ground in a really cold winter, they will come back as the same form.

So we don't have to replant.

My favorite part of producing local wine is giving tours in the vineyard and the production facility to our customers and showing them that we can go grow wonderful grapes and make beautiful wine here in Minnesota.

- While a glass of wine is nice to enjoy anywhere, it's especially fun to sip a glass among the winding vineyards.

- Best part of wine making is after the fall harvest when we get to blend the wines.

So we get to sit there and take wines for a living.

It's a terrible job.

- If you want to know more about Minnesota wine and wineries, go to minnesotagrow.com.

Jane sent us over here to visit with you and please Emily, tell us, what is your job here at Glensheen?

- Yeah, for sure.

So I'm the head garden of Glensheen and a long line of several head gardeners starting from the very early years as the gardens developed at Glensheen.

So I take care of everything.

It's me, and I have people who work with me.

I couldn't possibly do this all by myself, but we take everything from the turf to the tops of the trees.

It's anything in between, including vegetable gardens, flower gardens, tree pruning, making sure everything looks nice as best as we can, and yeah, that's what it looks like.

- The gardener's positions must have been very important at Glensheen even back when the Congdons lived here.

- Yeah, for sure.

It's funny.

In the house, actually, there's a list of how much people were paid and the gardener was tied with the butler at $75 a month, I believe it is.

So yeah, the head gardener was pretty important.

- Well, there's even a house here for the head gardener, right?

- Yes, the gardener was so important to the property that they decided to add on so that his family could grow, which is really nice.

So the gardener's cottage that people see now, it is the original.

It's not like we have done anything with it, but they added on so that the Wyness family could become bigger and that George could grow his family and then Bob, again, could grow his family.

It's quite nice actually.

- Did the gardens and orchard produce most of the food that the family used?

- Yeah, pretty much.

Since time has passed, we don't have as much land as we originally had back in the day.

So what we're sitting on here is about seven-ish acres and this is not what provided all of the food for the family.

A lot of this, what we see, they are practical gardens that we're standing in right now, but they were also show gardens.

So you kinda see a formality to even the vegetable gardens even on the servant side of the property, which is the side of the property that we're standing on right now.

So there was way more land.

And in addition to plants, they had milking cattle and they had horses as well.

So what is now the parking lot would've been a pasture, more so, and there's several picture of that as well.

So of course we can't just have a pasture here and have nobody park here.

So we had to change things up a little over time, (gentle music) but yeah, we just paired it down a little bit.

- You mentioned a vegetable garden and I'm excited to see that.

Could we go take a look?

- Yeah, absolutely.

So welcome to one of the seven vegetable gardens that we have in the midst of the vegetable garden.

So they're all parsed out, which is really nice.

And one of the things I focus on and you can tell in here, we're standing in what would've been our spinach (laughs) a while ago, but we took it all out, but I like to pack everything in here so we can get as much grown in here as possible.

So we have everything from beans to cabbage, to kale, to what was spinach, kohlrabi and carrots and peas in this garden here.

So they're all nicely tightly packed in.

And it's funny because there's not exactly a list of what they were eating back then.

So I just think about what I know people are eating in the early 1900s, a lot of root vegetables, things that you can store.

So of course we have potatoes here.

Like I said, we have carrots, things that you can can.

So lots of tomatoes, things that you can freeze.

So lots of beans and peas and things like that.

So throwing that all on the ground, and one of the things I love to grow also behind me would be corn as well.

It's so neat to me that this family decided to use their property like this.

Like I was saying before, there's a formality to this vegetable garden, but it was highly productive and you can tell from Bob's notes.

So Bob Wyness, one of the original gardeners, he and his father both kept a journal.

And this journal is thick.

It's every single day from the 1930s, all the way to the 1970s.

So there's 40 years almost of daily journaling from these head gardeners talking about how impactful these gardens were and how much they tended to it and how hard they worked on it.

So even though I don't have a list of what was grown in here, these vegetable gardens were extremely important to the family as well.

And so it's really exciting.

- How do you decide or how do you start all of these plants?

- Good question.

I'm not here in the winter time.

So from December to the beginning of March, I'm not here.

So when I get back, I'm ripping and ready to go to think about just what am I gonna put in the ground?

What am I gonna put in the ground?

And I'm so fortunate to have mentors who help me out with this.

And I work with a greenhouse called Bending Birches and their greenhouse manager, who's a dear, dear friend of mine helps me start a lot of this stuff.

So we purchase our own seeds from various seed producers and anything that needs to be started early, I send up to Bending Birches and she tends to it for me.

So that includes my tomatoes, some of the cabbages, but a lot of stuff that you see, especially in this garden that we're standing in, it is just all started by seed.

I try not to start too much from seedlings like that from starts just so I can pack even more in to these gardens.

- Then do you plant different crops as far as, these are getting done, I'm gonna plant more peas for later on then.

Succession planting.

- Succession planting.

- Yes.

- We have an extremely short season here and I do succession plant a little bit, but what I like to do in this garden, and I don't think the family would've done anything like this is I do like to put a cover crop over and let the ground rest.

So letting the ground rest is super important to me.

So just to have a better harvest for year after year, and since I'm not trying to feed a family off of this garden, it's okay for me to let the ground rest.

So in this upper garden, it'd be behind me over here, we had garlic, which is now drying in the shed, but now that entire ground is open.

So we'll put on a cover crop, which will die in the wintertime, but will then give nutrients back to the soil, which is extremely important to me, 'cause the way that we run our gardens here is that I am not adding inorganic fertilizer throughout the year.

In the beginning the year, I had a calculated amount of inorganic fertilizer, but everything else is gonna be compost.

Everything else is gonna be organic nutrients into the soil.

So we're building up soil health every year.

So that's really important.

- Emily, what happens to all the produce here?

- Yeah.

That's such a good question.

And since I started here, it's been so important to me to see this food be used appropriately.

And this year we're trying out doing a miniature CSA for our students that work here and it's been so much fun.

It's been awesome.

So my crew, we harvest the food and package it up for our staff here.

There's about 30 people on a list that ask for a CSA every single week and they just get fresh produce, 'cause I mean, you remember being in college and you're just eating ramen every day and all these other packaged processed foods, anything you can get your hands on.

And when I was in college, I actually used a little bit of land of a friend of mine to grow my own food and I just remember how important that was to me.

And so I'm really excited to be able of pass it on and share that with students who are busy working, busy studying, they don't exactly have access to grow their own food at their rental homes or their apartments or something like that.

So that's where a lot of it goes.

- This is so wonderful, but I see a lot of beautiful flowers and planters too.

Can we see those?

- Yeah, absolutely.

(gentle music) - I have a question.

I've always been interested in the University of Minnesota's apple breeding program.

How long has it been going on?

- Well, as a matter of fact, we've been in business, if you wanna call it that for over 100 years.

We actually started back in 1908 at this facility.

We actually started a few years before that, but we do the count from when we ended up at this facility and our goal back then, as it still is now, is to produce apples that will grow in this climate and not just barely edible apples, enjoyable apples.

So we're hard at work at that.

We've had some success, but we're not done yet.

That breeding process that we're part of right here is actually a very long process.

I mean, not only have we been at it for over 100 years, but it takes us 20 to 30 years to develop a new variety once we start the breeding.

And so we have a handful of good ones.

You probably know about honey crisp, that's maybe our most famous child.

That was 30 years from the time the breeding was done until it was released into the market.

And the other thing, not only is it a very long process, but it's a very, I guess you'd say intense process because only one out of 10,000 of the trees that we develop over the course of several years is good enough to make it all the way through that process and be named and released.

So by the time you see something like sweet tango behind me here, there's 9,999 that didn't make it and so we're really very committed to sending you only the cream of the crop.

- [Narrator] Ask the Arboretum Experts has been brought to you by the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum in Chaska, dedicated to enriching lives through the appreciation and knowledge of plants.

- So I'm super excited to show you the flowers that we have here, and that's one of the main focuses of, as much as I would love vegetables to be the main focus, flowers are what really bring the grounds to life and even in the spring.

So I try to stretch from the earliest as I can.

So we have snow drops right in the beginning of the year, coming in the end of March and then we have everything to the mums all the way to the end of the year.

So I try to get the entire longest season as we can in Northern Minnesota.

So we do everything from planters, and these planters, again, I start early, early, and I'm super thankful for the folks at Bending Birches.

They let me start them still when it's snowing outside and they'll take care of them for me in the greenhouse so they can grow.

So by the time they get here, they're nice and they're full and they're lush and everything like that.

And then everything else when I come back from my winter snooze, I get everything planned and set, what flowers we're gonna have, where they're gonna go and how many we put in.

I mean this year, I think we put in maybe 300 flats of plants this year, and that's just on this half of the property, of course, 'cause of course the portable garden is under construction this year.

We had hundreds of flats of flowers go in and it was so much fun.

We try to pack everything in super tight.

And we want color as vibrant as possible.

When I look at photos from when Bob was running the gardens, back in the day, one of his trademarks was, I mean, packing everything in as tight as possible.

Even in the black and white photos, you can tell that.

I mean, he must have just planted everything just right next to each other 'cause everything looks so full in there.

And when I started here, I didn't quite understand that concept 'cause when you're usually a home gardener you're like, "I have a budget."

You could run yourself outta house and home.

I think a lot of gardeners know this, (laughs) especially if your spouse is like, "Okay (laughs)."

So usually when you're home gardener, there's a wallet stop for you there, and there's also just a time limit, but we work on this 40 hours a week and there's five of us working on that.

That's tons of hours.

So we have the opportunity to replicate what Bob would've done and packing as much color as you can.

So in this upper bed here, we grow every single year zinnias and we grow them from seed.

Some people call them zinnias, we call them zinnias here, but we grow them from seed.

We keep our seed every single year because there's lots and lots and lots of zinnias up there.

And this year I decided to pack in lots and lots of snapdragons 'cause they're a fan favorite, who doesn't love a good snapdragon?

And in the midst of the snapdragons, I actually have an up and coming rose display.

It just needs maturing.

So on the side closest to us are gonna be older roses, roses that were on the original historic list that work for our zone.

And then on the tennis court wall back there are gonna be newer rose varieties to show people the difference between roses how far we've come along.

I think when people think of roses, they think of a single stem rose you can buy at your grocery store or whatever, a lot of Valentine's day thoughts come to mind, but there's a wide variety of roses.

So that's an up and coming display.

I think in three years, it should be pretty prime.

And then in the lower bed behind me here is gonna be the original rose garden where we do have some of the original roses.

The Harison's Yellow is one of them.

It blooms quick, but it is a beautiful, rambling, yellow rose.

It's fantastic.

Don't blink 'cause it'll disappear right before your eyes.

And also in that bed now we have a polyantha rose that was bred by the University of Minnesota and it's so much fun.

So instead of having one big flower, it's a bunch of little flowers that make up a cluster and it's called the Northern accents collection.

If you know the Sven and Ole stories, maybe some folks have been up to Grand Marais to eat it, Sven & Ole's, they're just old bad jokes.

So they're Sven, Ole, Lena and Sigrid are the names of the four roses up there that we host in and they were given up to us to test and they've thrived so excitingly.

So they're a rose that technically don't need any work.

You can let them go.

You don't need to wrap them or anything.

So I said, "Okay, we'll throw them in the ground and see what happens."

And they're thriving and it's so much fun.

So we get to mix the old with the new in this.

A lot of people ask me, especially with the flower plan, do I go exactly off of the plan that was originally here?

And it's one of those unfortunate things again.

For this side of the property, there weren't planting plans as so much as there was in the formal garden.

In the formal garden, especially now, after it's reconstruction will be more based on a plan from 1907.

But in here again, I go off of very not blurry, but very grainy black and white photos.

There was no 4K, no HD back then.

They didn't have five cameras.

Only one camera back then.

So I try to parse out what some of the flowers are and bring them back in here and see if we can just recreate, mostly the sense, mostly the feeling.

So when you walk through here, I want you have the feeling that a family lives here, a family shows off this place, that the flowers mean something to the family, that it's it's worthwhile.

So the last thing that I'm really excited about this year is that I decided to implement a cut flower garden in the midst of the vegetable garden.

One of the things that is on the planting sketch is actually closer to the house, but still in this garden along the edge here, there was supposed to be a cut flower garden and they had cut flowers inside the greenhouse as well.

There used to be once a upon a time, back in the day, they would have flowers in a lot of the rooms in the house.

So you need to have a very large cut flower garden, 'cause I don't know if you know, but this house is quite large (laughs).

There's lots of rooms in this house that you need to fill with flowers.

So these days I can't have live plants in the house.

We try to keep the bugs from being inside the house to preserve the collection as best as we can, but having a cut flower garden and be able to have cut flowers inside of our admin buildings is really, really fun.

It's so much fun to practice bouquets, everything like that.

And I'm learning still on that, but it's been such a fun process.

- So do you actually have that now already or is that in the future?

- No.

So it's here.

So in the midst of this garden, it's in the front corner up the way.

So one thing that's blooming right now are the sunflowers and they're such a delight.

They're so cute and dahlias will be coming up next week.

I decided to have a nice solid dahlia patch.

They're so neat.

They last long into the fall.

I mean, if anybody's never seen a dahlia, I mean, you gotta look it up.

They're a little bit of work, so you need to dig them outta the ground for us up here and store them for the winter but it's worth it every time.

- Emily, with all of your beautiful plants, do you have trouble with critters?

- Yeah (laughs).

Yeah, and I've been here for five years and I'm still looking for the magic answer of how do we make peace with the animals that wanna eat everything and it's so tough.

So in our flower beds, one of the main issues I have is gonna be with our hosta and our daylilies.

So dear love hosta.

It must be just like candy to them 'cause they'll just go ham on it.

So we spray for that.

And the thing about spraying for any critters is that if you're gonna spray it for the long term, and even though it says, "Stays on after rain," I would just recommend spraying after rain anyway, but you need to switch up what you're spraying with.

You need to give them a different scent.

You gotta let them know... You gotta keep them on their hooves.

You can't just let them think that the smell starts to become okay.

And then around our vegetable gardens with things that do need to be caged off, we do put a fence around each and every one of them.

The rabbits still sneak their way in, but I can make peace with a few rabbits versus letting everything wander through here themselves.

This year I tried something new and it worked out quite well.

I have garlic, potatoes and onions in an open garden without putting a fence around.

I was like, "We're gonna risk it and we're gonna see what happens."

So far, so good.

The potatoes are coming along.

They've started nibbling at the top of the potatoes, but we're good.

We're doing good so far.

So I'm gonna see how far I can push those boundaries of, "Do I need to have fences on every single garden?"

- Is there or are there any plants that were originally grown here when the Congdons were here?

- Yeah, absolutely.

And none of the vegetables, of course, (gentle music) because they're annual esque, but we have currents and we have gooseberries and we have rhubarb that are original to the house and it's the coolest thing in the world 'cause they're so old, they're so mature and they're so delicious and it's really, really fun to keep those going on.

- Thank you so much Emily for preserving this history and this beautiful place and for showing it to us.

- Yes.

Thank you so much for joining me.

This was really awesome.

- [Narrator] Funding for Prairie Yard and Garden is provided by Heartland Motor Company, providing service to Minnesota and the Dakotas for over 30 years in the heart of truck country.

Heartland Motor Company, we have your best interest at heart.

Farmer's Mutual Telephone Company and Federated Telephone Cooperative, proud to be powering ACIRA, pioneers in bringing state-of-the-art technology to our rural communities, Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen in honor of Shalom Hill Farm, a nonprofit rural education retreat center in a beautiful Prairie setting near Windham, Minnesota.

And by friends of Prairie Yard and Garden, a community of supporters like you who engage in the long term growth of the series.

To become a friend of Prairie Yard and Garden, visit pioneer.org/pyg.